prayers for Jose

The fate of my honeymoon memories lies in the hands of a man named "R, Samuel."

Last night when I was soon-to-be-ironically trying to print photos from the honeymoon, iPhoto started acting weird. I thought I should update it to make it stop fritzing out on me, but I didn't have enough room left on my hard drive, so I deleted a few things and restarted my computer.

Except that it didn't re-start.

Instead, this middle finger flashed incessantly on the screen:

With each flash I heard a little chant. You. Are. Screwed. Mac. Doesn't. Do. This. You. Are. Stupid. Epic. Fail. Should. Have. Backed. Up. Hard. Drive. P. S. Ha. Ha.

After a little troubleshooting via Brian's computer and a few minor temper tantrums from me, I consented that I had no idea what the F was going on but since I was stupid (as the Question Mark Folder reminded me), I shouldn't try to deal with this myself.

So today at 2 p.m. I told Josh the Genius at the Apple store that I would have a public breakdown if he couldn't fix my computer. He did some fancy things with his fancy tools and then told me way too calmly that my hard drive was probably fried, but he'd take it in the back and double check just in case. During his 3-minute absence, I started mentally cataloguing the 80 gigs of LIFE that I was about to lose, which naturally made me start crying while sitting on a stool by myself - public meltdown begins, check!

LIFE

Honeymoon photos. Every last one of them.

Wedding photos. Mine and other people's (not the photographer's).

Photos from the last month

About 40 job-hunt-related files, including resumes, cover letters, and most importantly, the list of everywhere that I've applied and what the job was (this is pretty critical considering I can't really keep up with all of them)

File containing all my passwords

Etc.

Etc.

Josh wasn't so much able to help me as he was to make me internalize my meltdown, pushing it so deep that it will most likely materialize as me beating a piece of raw chicken in the kitchen in three weeks. He described a clicking sound, which I will clearly now call the Click Of Death. Unfortunately, Josh can't do anything about the COD, so he passed me off to a Recovery Data Specialist across town.

What Josh did do for me is plop a new hard drive in my computer, free of charge. And, since they don't sell 80 GBs anymore, the smallest one he could give me was 160 GBs. Maybe his kindness had something to do with the fact that he's moving to Austin, or that I was carrying a motorcycle helmet and he has a motorcycle, or that I had preemptively stated my tendency to break down in public I DON'T KNOW, but it saved me $240, and that is (in a word) awesome.

I turned over the hard drive to a man who, in exchange, gave me a business card with the name R, Samuel on it. Now I'm just waiting for an email from R, who was supposed to contact me by 8 p.m. If they can recover the data from Jose the Hard Drive, it will run me somewhere around $450, which is like 5 steak dinners if anyone's counting. And because I'm sure you wanted to know, his name is Jose because my dad helped set up my wireless network years ago and gave it the name No Way Jose (as in, no way you're hacking into this internet, F-er).

So say some prayers for Jose and the raw chicken. I'll keep you posted.